Thursday

an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem

2017Personal Project

Edna St. Vincent Millay always seems like she is writing today not the early 20th century. This poem is a break-up with a previous lover. I imagine it as an argument where she starts of letting him down sweetly, but he won’t take no as an answer and she has to make herself more emphatic and louder to be heard.

To show this visually within the calligraphy, I started with a simple Spencerian script with emphasized words in the same-sized, but bolder Engrosser’s script. As the conversation gets more intense, the baseline stays consistent. The words, however, get bolder and and larger until they are running into each other and overlapping, trying to take up as much space as possible to be heard visually.